Complexity Ignored

In the 1950’s, Rachel Carson, in her book “Silent Spring”, sounded a warning siren that was heard around the world. She told the story of a chemical death caused by man’s ignorance as he attempts to control his environment, free himself from pests, artificially enhance the growth of his food supply, and “manage” the ecology of flora and fauna on this planet.

By describing relationships between various living species and their environment, she started a campaign to abolish the use of harmful chemicals in agriculture and by the consumer. Her book became a harbinger of change to come which included the modern environmental movement.

But, Carson provided a second, and equally powerful, message. Through many examples she showed that everything is interconnected. In the course of making her case for the harmful effects of insecticides, Carson skillfully defined the interrelationships between various living creatures and their environment. In doing so, she pointed out how poorly the field of biological science understood these connections.   Some 50 years later, the study of connectivity in Nature has begun to take hold in the form of Systems Biology and the idea that Nature is composed of complex dynamic systems.

However, it seems that our government biologists and park rangers  haven’t gotten the message. Perhaps they attended the wrong schools. For, it is among this group of people that we regularly hear about “wildlife management” — the idea that man can control a population of creatures with a predictable outcome.

I recently visited Mojave National Preserve where hunting is permitted by the National Park Service. On the facility’s bulletin board one sees a poster with a macho, well fed hunter in camouflage dress holding up the head of a dead deer.  In this age of plentiful food easily available in grocery stores, our government permits and encourages the killing of wild animals. But most disturbing about all of this is that the National Park Service permits this to happen in the name of “wildlife management” — controlling the population size of game herds.

One of two things is happening. Either government biologists are ignoring complexity science or people in complexity science have failed to make themselves understood.

No matter what the source of ignorance, the bottom line is that one cannot manage Nature because Nature is not predictable. And, Nature is not predictable because it is a complex dynamic system. This is a basic premise of complexity science !! We see this in  weather predictions, the stock market, fish schools, bird flocks and animal populations.

Those of us who study complexity know that one characteristic of complex systems is that they can be sensitive to initial conditions. We humans cannot manage initial conditions to the precision necessary to “manage” wildlife. Because of this, the killing of game has the potential of causing wild swings in animal populations. This is particularly true when governments are unable to control hunting. In fact, there are places in Northwestern British Columbia and Alaska where hunting is allowed and there is a major decline in the populations of the Caribou and Dall Sheep shown in this blog’s photos.  We humans simply cannot control complex systems. Yet, the Canadian government, the US National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the US Forest Service are trying to convince us that they are “managing” game stocks by permitting hunting.

Nature is ultimately inexplicable by definitive forms of analysis and therefore uncontrollable by human minds. Indeed, these bureaucrats need to go back to school and learn this fundamental fact that has been revealed to us by complexity science.

I welcome your comments.